Posts tagged with "Illinois":

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was on hand for last week's groundbreaking of Chicago’s next new sports and entertainment arena by Pelli Clarke Pelli.
The 10,000 seat McCormick Place Event Center will add to the already vast McCormick Place convention facilities as well as be the home court for the DePaul University Blue Demon’s college basketball team. Designed by New Haven–based Pelli Clarke Pelli, the 300,000 square foot arena will be connected to a 51-story, 1,200-room Marriott hotel by Gensler, also currently under construction. Scheduled to open in 2017, before the 2017–18 basketball season, the Event Center will also function as a concert venue and convention space.
Filling an entire block, the arena steps back at its corners, providing outdoor gathering space. The building's expansive glass facade is punctuated by intermittent corrugated metal–paneled pavilions enclosing the building's services. Large digital displays weave from interior to exterior, broadcasting the night’s events, and animating the arena facade. The highly transparent entrances are meant to extend the arena’s experience out on to the public plaza and surrounding streets.
As a means of connecting the project more directly to the neighborhood, the main event floor as well as concourse will sit at street level. Along with the highly transparent façade, there is a possibility that some of the restaurants and concessions may be accessible from the exterior of the building. A reveal in the seating will also allow for a direct view into the event space and to student seating area from the street.
The building's most noticeable design element is its curved membrane roof. The light-weight structure arches over the event floor and seating in an homage to other gathering spaces in Chicago, such as the Auditorium Theater and the Grand Ballroom of Navy Pier. The nature of the roof also allows for large gill-like apertures, which will be lit at night, broadcasting the arena into the city.

Foster + Partners has revealed initial images of a proposed Apple store at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River. The new store will replace their existing Michigan Avenue flagship store six blocks to the north.
Echoing the company’s 5th Avenue store in New York, the design calls for a large, mostly glass structure with an expanded retail space below ground. Unlike the 5th Avenue store, and more akin to Foster’s recent Aix-en-Provence, France Apple iteration, the new Chicago Store will feature a light solid roof suspended on two large columns.
Located on, and below, Pioneer Square, the store will have one of the most visible locations in the city, surrounded by some of Chicago’s most iconic architectural landmarks. The square itself is flanked by the Tribune Tower to the north, the modernist Bruce Graham designed 401 North Michigan Avenue (formerly the Equitable Building) to the East, and the Wrigley Building immediately across Michigan Avenue. The view up the river to the west will also include the Trump Tower, Marina City, and Mies’ AMA Plaza (formerly IBM Plaza), making this location one of the most recognized tourist, not to mention retail, locations in the city.
The 20,000-square-foot retail space will occupy an unused cafeteria at Lower Michigan Avenue. The store will also engage with the infrequently used Riverwalk along the north bank of the river. New balustrades and stairs will be added, as well as the 34-foot-tall glass wall of the store itself.
According to representatives from Foster + Partners at a recent courtesy presentation to the City Planning Commission, there will be no retail at the surface Pioneer Square level, with the 14-foot-above-grade glass structure acting as a grand entrance. The city has already approved the project, and construction is planned to begin next year.

Often, there's a blast of attention for the opening of a Biennial, or Biennale, or Triennale. This happens partly because the media descends on a place for the first few days while opening events abound, and then go back on their merry ways. It's also due in part to the event's programming—how much of note actually happens after the initial weekend? The Chicago Architecture Biennial, now over a month on, is bucking that trend by doing a great job of extending its initial burst of programming.
AN was able to check in on the Biennial and see some of the ongoing, publicly engaging talks, lectures, exhibitions, and performances. And there were plenty.
The trip started with a surreal performance by Jessica Lang Dance in collaboration with none other than New York architect Steven Holl. For 20 minutes at the Harris Theater on the northern edge of Millennium Park, Tesseracts of Time combined architecture and performance arguably the most potent way of all the Biennial's performances, as nimble bodies gracefully moved around and through stage sets designed by Holl.
The most engaging parts of the Biennial are not necessarily the ones in the Chicago Cultural Center. Periphery events have a considerable range of programming, from environmental issues and Chicago-centric ones, to global questions of infrastructural inequality. The latter was on tap Saturday at "Architecture and Inequality," hosted by the history collective Aggregate. The six panels partly focused on extending the discussion from Aggregate's special issue "Black Lives Matter," which was a look at the structural challenges designers face when making cities and places for everyone.
The discussions were surprisingly tailored to Chicago, and provocations from historians Meredith TenHoor, Sharon Haar, and Adrienne Brown were complemented by more contemporary presentations from Jonathan Massey and Emmanuel Pratt. TenHoor discussed infrastructure and inequality, using the unbuilt crosstown expressway in Chicago as an example of tangible inequality that galvanized a community—something that needs to happen today surrounding unequal urban spheres such as housing and transportation access.
The panel was dynamic, illustrating the ways that architecture plays into uneven patterns of development and habitation in the city. At times, perhaps structural racism was over-conflated with economic inequality, but nonetheless the panels drew out the strong connections between the two. This is just one of many socially-minded panels that make the moralizing whiners sound silly when they complain that the biennial is not engaging with the city of Chicago and its unique urban problems.
Switching gears very quickly, I headed to the standing-room only Chicago Arts Club to see legendary critic Bob Somol and his compadre Wiel Arets discuss with Geoff Goldberg the main exhibition of the Biennial. Somol is the former dean of the University of Illinois, Chicago, School of Architecture, while Arets is the dean of rival Illinois Institute of Technology. Goldberg is the son of Bertrand Goldberg. The three Chicago-marinated experts discussed the Biennial by choosing projects that caught their attention. Somol was especially taken in by Sou Fujimoto's submission Everything is Architecture and Atelier Bow-wow's Piranesi Circus. He compared Fujimoto's installation to Hans Hollein's Architecture is Everywhere.
The Biennial's strength is in its breadth and sprawl, but on Saturday it became a weakness. We couldn't make it to a very intriguing event, "House Practices", a discussion with Amanda Williams, Julia Sedlock, and Mejay Gula about their house-based practices. It took place far form the central loop, however, so I was not able to see it or the brilliant-looking exhibition also at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Lessons from Modernism: Environmental Design Strategies in Architecture 1925-1970.

As part of this upcoming April Tiny Homes Summit at the University of Illinois Chicago, the AIA has launched the Tiny Homes Competition. Organized by AIA Chicago, in partnership with Landon Bone Baker Architects, Pride Action Tank, Windy City Times, and a long list of additional local and national advocacy groups, the competition seeks new modular alternatives to affordable and subsidized housing.
Sited on four conjoined lots in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood, the competition also hopes to engage a conversation on Chicago’s large city-owned vacant lot surplus. One module from the winning proposal will be constructed and presented at the spring summit.
The competition will specifically address homelessness among young adults between the ages of 18–24, a group that makes up 31 percent of Chicago’s unsheltered homeless population and 19 percent of the sheltered homeless population. Proposals will outline planned 12-unit developments in which residents will have a safe secure space to sleep, study, and store their belonging. The brief also asks for a 1,200 square foot communal space and secure bike storage to be integrated into the overall site plan.
The 350 square foot units themselves will include bathrooms, food storage and prep area, and sleeping area. With a $30,000 limit on material and mechanical systems, teams are being asked to design units that can be produced for under $60,000. The brief also stipulates that the units will follow city building codes, while zoning variances will be obtained to allow for the unique configuration of the projects.
Now open, digital presentation boards are due January 30th, with winners being announced in March 2016. Jury members include city officials, architects and advocates. Winners will be awarded $5,000, as well as an additional $5,000 to develop construction drawings.

One of the more unusual things I heard when preparing for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) was a tip from someone involved that there was going to be "a ballet about Steven Holl." I was obviously excited about this prospect, and I finally got to see the final results last Friday. It may not have been exactly about Steven himself, but it was close.
It turns out that CAB co-artistic director Sarah Herda had dreamed up a pairing in the initial stages of planning the Biennial. The result is a surreal performance by Jessica Lang Dance in collaboration with none other than New York architect Steven Holl. For 20 minutes at the Harris Theater on the northern edge of Millennium Park, "Tesseracts of Time" combined architecture and performance arguably the most potent way of all the Biennial's performances, as nimble bodies gracefully moved around and through stage sets designed by Holl. Lang took "a sculptural approach to this new work, utilizing visually arresting sets and costumes, enabling three-dimensional interactions with bodies and objects that evoke emotions and tangible sensation."
The first act included a large, site-specific projection of a wooden model of Holl's Explorations of IN, which provided the backdrop for the experimental dance. Dancers emerged on the screen, superimposed into the model at the exact scale as the real-life dancers below. The music for the show was chosen based on material in "The Architectonics of Music," taught by Steven Holl and Dimitra Tsachrelia at Columbia GSAPP. It includes David Lang, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, and Arvo Pärt.
The real fireworks came in the second act when three fabric-over-tube forms sat on the stage, glowing white. The dancers moved in and through them, before the shapes were gradually lifted up off the ground. As they rose from the dance surface, colored lights illuminated the fabric forms from the sides of the stage. Tesseracts was based on the four seasons, compressed into 20 minutes. The colors of the backdrop and the hanging Holl forms changed in harmony with the changing of the seasons.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/QlFxZfu-GRo
For more architecture and performance, check out the discussion, "Building Blocks: Choreography as Architecture,” by Minneapolis-based choreographer Chris Schlichting and visual artist Jennifer Davis, at the Chicago Cultural Center.

The seventh AIA Illinois Gold Medal has been presented to Carol Ross Barney of Ross Barney Architects. Barney’s career spans 40 years of practice in Chicago, in which her firm has taken on civic, social, and cultural projects across the country.
Known as a champion for the public’s right to design excellence her work often is designed for the public realm. Outside of her practice, Barney is the founder and first president of the Chicago Women in Architecture. Barney is also the first woman to win AIA Illinois’ Gold Medal.
Most recently in Chicago, Ross Barney Architects has received praise for its design of the newest portion of the Chicago River Walk. Just to the south, a new elevated public train station of her design has also recently opened. A new central chiller on the south campus of OSU highlights Barney’s commitment to high design even when it comes to infrastructural projects. Remarking on her way with mixing civic, social, and public design, Mike Waldinger, executive vice president of AIA Illinois remarked, “it’s as if Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs had a secret child.”
Along with the Gold Medal, Ross Barney Architects received the AIA Illinois Daniel Burnham Honor Award for the Master Plan of the 606, a new linear park recently finished on the northwest side of Chicago.

“The State of the Art of Architecture” delivered by the Chicago Architecture Biennial Exhibition must leave lay-visitors bewildered by one overwhelming subliminal message: Contemporary architecture ceased to exist, the discipline’s guilt and bad conscience has sapped its vitality, driven it to self-annihilation and architects have now en masse dedicated themselves to doing good via basic social work. A less charitable interpretation sees the hijacking of the newly created Chicago Architecture Biennial by a marginal but academically entrenched ideological tendency within the discipline that has abandoned their societal remit of innovating the built environment at the world technological frontier and instead pours its allocated resources into concept-art style documentation and agitation of behalf of underdeveloped regions and milieu.
—Patrik Schumacher

From inside / a review far away from the Neo-Liberal Jealousy and last Übermensch libertarian Patrik Schumacher jiggering... this past week / but within the ideological and political Tabula rasa that operated on the situation / Chicago Cultural Center was (is) before everything a social center... the last homeless spot in downtown Chicago / With a tacitly organized passive violence, during the Biennial opening days only “members” with authorized badges were admitted / Rejecting the regular “trashy-freak” users / To quote Bourdieu ... Taste is an affair of business, exclusion, and social class... contemporary museums widely betray the emancipating hypothesis of their origin and foundation / At the Biennial all architects were participating to this “hygienist” strategy / But the most absurd ... was to listen to their speeches about bio-politics, greenish-color and bottom-up slummy romanticism, saving Willy and the world with Joseph Grima (the curator in charge of this specific Activism Carnival) on the throne of those selves-complaisance-indulgence... at the spot and the time where the Cultural-Social Center became “bunkerized.”
... Between Patrik and Zaha, who are ignoring with cynicism the workers’ dramatic condition of servitude in Abu Dhabi, and who participated to the biggest brainwashing enterprise of these past ten years: technologies as a strategy of ignorance-arrogance-positivism (pleonasm), and symmetrically the participants of this Biennial who “naively and innocently” excluded the damaged bodies and disordered minds, while wearing their black Penguin suits to moralistically enact political entertainment... WHO are the most criminal?
Simply the two faces of the same coin or bitcoin... feeding themselves as a reciprocity simulacrum, as Ping-Pong between the Cynical and the Clown... the history of intellectual Tabula rasa... of architecture discipline...
Could we find a crack between the techno-fetishism and at its opposite the techno-regression? It is so comfortable to choose one of these chapels... there are many advantages to reduce or to falsify consciousness and knowledge... Techno-sciences shouldn’t be an Object any more.... but a Subject that we have to re-appropriate in “democratic anthropo-technic” strategies...
Francois Roche

On October 22nd, marking the 130th anniversary of the Chicago Architecture Club and as part of the ongoing Chicago Architecture Foundation's Currencies of Architecture exhibition, Stanley Tigerman unveiled a follow up to his 1978 “Titanic” photomontage. Entitled “The Epiphany,” the new image, somewhat ironically, is a protest against what Tigerman sees as a contemporary infatuation with icons.
The image itself depicts Mies Van Der Rohe’s Crown Hall and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao sitting side-by-side on the lunar surface. From the same sky as the original “Titanic,” a bomb is falling to destroy them both. As with its predecessor, “The Epiphany” is less a critique of Van Der Rohe or Gehry, as much as it is of those that hold them and their work as the basis for their own work.
“The problem with icon is that people use it as a starting point,” Tigerman explained to the crowd at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. “Instead of tabula rasa, a blank page. Inspiration is the emptiness of your page, or your blank computer screen.”
“Architects need to teach, in some way,” Tigerman encouraged in the conversation around the unveiling, which was part of a larger event which included discussion of the state of the field and the current Chicago Architecture Biennial. Tigerman also took the time to express his pleasure with the current generation of young architects, and his ambition to hand off the field. “I am very pleased with the current generation. I feel good. I can go now.”
"The Epiphany" and Currencies of Architecture can be seen for free at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Among the Windy City's most well-known assets are its universities, from DePaul in Lincoln Park and the Loop to the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. Many of these campuses, in turn, are characterized by heavy brick and stone architecture in the Neo-Gothic style. The dominance of a single architectural style—a feature of many institutions of higher learning, not just Chicago's—presents a challenge to contemporary architects, who must combine a sensitivity to the existing campus fabric with the imperatives of contemporary college life.
Perkins+Will's Temple Hoyne Buell Hall, University of Illinois, Champaign. (Eric Fredericks / Flickr)
"Context is very important in our design," affirmed Perkins+Will design principal Bryan Schabel, who works on a variety of projects including educational buildings. "We pay particular attention to the massing of our buildings and their relationship to the existing conditions—whether it is an adjacent building, a path or road, or a court or quadrangle that we either want to enhance or create with our designs. Additionally, we try to take cues from the scale and materiality of the existing campus when we design."
Next week, Schabel will participate in a panel on campus design at the Facades+ Chicago conference. His co-panelists include moderator William Menking (AN), Valerio Dewalt Train Associates' Joe Valerio, and Patrick Loughran of Goettsch Partners.
As for cases where the existing architectural language and modern mandates come into conflict, an open mind is key. "Often times, some literal aspects of the context may be counter to the goals of the project," said Schabel. "The solidity of some historical campuses' contexts, for instance, may not achieve the daylighting goals we have in our contemporary buildings, so we may use the context in a more abstract way to relate the new and old."
School administrators tend to support such an approach, he explained. "While we have had clients that wanted a more literal interpretation of their historic campuses, most of them have fortunately been in line with our ideas of modernity, as long as they still relate in scale with the overall experience of the campus," said Schabel.
Hear more from Schabel, his co-panelists, and other movers and shakers in the world of facade design and fabrication at Facades+ Chicago November 5-6. Register today on the conference website.

Since 2008, there has been a giant hole where Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire was supposed to rise some 2,000 feet out of the ground. The project lapsed due to financial woes by Irish developer Garrett Kelleher. The foundation is in place, and it looks like a place where a giant swimming pool or music venue would fit nicely, but AN is hearing that developers are working with Bjarke Ingels' Danish firm BIG on a possible Spire part to.

[Editor’s Note: Opinions expressed in letters to the editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions or sentiments of the newspaper. AN welcomes reader letters, which could appear in our regional print editions. To share your opinion, please email editor@archpaper.com. ]
The State of the Art of Architecture, delivered by the Chicago Architecture Biennial Exhibition, must leave lay-visitors bewildered by one overwhelming subliminal message: Contemporary architecture has ceased to exist, the discipline’s guilt and bad conscience has sapped its vitality, driven it to self-annihilation, and architects have now en masse dedicated themselves to doing good via basic social work.
A less charitable interpretation sees the hijacking of the newly created Chicago Architecture Biennial as a marginal but academically entrenched ideological tendency within the discipline that has abandoned its societal remit of innovating the built environment at the world technological frontier, and is instead pouring its allocated resources into concept-art style documentation and agitation on behalf of underdeveloped regions and the milieu.
I am rather suspicious of these creative/artistic engagements with poverty. It sometimes risks mutating into a questionable aesthetization of poverty, a questionable romance. Questionable because what the poor of this world most probably (and rightly) aspire to requires little creativity and imagination because it is already plotted out for them by the ladder of development leading up to what has been achieved in the most advanced arenas of world civilization, where—in contrast—true, path-breaking creativity is indeed called for. I rather feel that our discourse has become far too moralizing and politicized.
It’s all too familiar by now: Political correctness swamps the discipline and takes over its discursive spaces. For example, why should an ARCHITECTURAL biennial give a huge space to an ART project like Amanda Williams’ Color(ed) Theory when ART has already its own (many more) venues for public display/discourse? How is this more relevant to contemporary architecture than contemporary architecture itself?
Patrik Schumacher

Among the many continuing education opportunities available to members of the AEC industry, the Facades+ conference series stands out for a number of reasons.
Not least of these is its unique two-day format, which combines a symposium packed with top-tier keynotes, panel discussions, Q&A sessions, and networking breaks with an opportunity to dive deep into facade design and fabrication in a hands-on tech/lab or dialog workshop.
Facades+ Chicago, timed to coincide with the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, includes a particularly impressive lineup of workshops. Attendees can choose one of three day-long tech workshops or a total of two of six half-day dialog workshops. Tech workshops include “Dynamo for Computational BIM,” led by Autodesk’s Colin McCrone and Neal Burnham, and “Integrated Parametric Daylighting and Energy Modeling for High Performance Building Design,” with the University of Pennsylvania School of Design’s Mostapha Roudsari, creator of Ladybug and Honeybee. The third tech workshop, “Curtain Wall Systems: From Sketch to Completion” is a Facades+ first. With guidance from Bart Harrington and Richard Braunstein, both of YKK AP America, participants will learn about different curtain wall system types and installation techniques by assembling, installing, and glazing a series of mockups.
The Facades+ Chicago dialog workshop offerings are equally wide-ranging, and some of them extend upon the symposium's content. Morning sessions include “New Techniques in Parametric Design,” with SOM’s Neil Katz and Joel Putnam, “Energy Efficient or Healthy Buildings: Do We Have to Choose?” led by Dr. Helen Sanders (Sage Glass), Steve Fronek (Wausau Window and Wall Systems), Jim Baney (Schuler Shook), and Soyoung Hwang (WELL Building Institute), and Part I of “Listening to the Facade: Acoustic Design Considerations and Techniques for the Building Envelope,” with Ryan Biziorek and Fiona Gillan, both of Arup, and JGMA’s Juan Moreno. During the afternoon, attendees can choose among “Facades Driving Indoor Environments,” led by Stephen Ray (SOM), Arathi Gowda (SOM), Narada Golden (YR&G), and Lisa White (Passive House Institute US), “Performance Validation of Facades Through Simulation and Testing,” with Buro Happold’s Emir Pekdemir, USG Corporation’s AJ Rao, and Derek Cavataio, of Architectural Testing, Inc., or Part II of the ARUP/JGMA panel. The afternoon session on “Listening to the Facade” includes a field trip to the Arup SoundLab, a short walk down the Chicago River at 35 East Wacker Drive.
Enrollment in dialog and tech workshops is extremely limited—sign up today to secure your place. Register or learn more at the Facades+ Chicago website.